Reform of Jerry.
"Now, here's a part of this story that will interest you. Robert had a friend who was chief engineer of a building in Ann street. He told this friend about Jerry, and the engineer said he'd take a chance on him. He put Jerry to work stoking the boiler at a dollar and a half a day. After a year or so there was a vacancy and Jerry became assistant engineer. A little while later the chief engineer resigned and Jerry after awhile, the ex-crook, became chief engineer. He left there after awhile to take charge of a big plant on Long Island, and he sent for his brother John and gave him a job.
"A few years later the two brothers called on me in Chicago. They had saved about $6,000 between them and were on their way to a new town in the West to start a manufacturing business of their own. Each had married a girl who knew nothing of their prison record and had children. They prospered exceedingly. John died several years ago, but only a few months ago, when my brother Robert died, an old man, whom nobody but myself recognized, came from the West for the funeral and shed tears at the grave. It was Jerry. He is still living, and is the leading citizen of his town and worth at least half a million dollars.
"Criminals who reform? There are thousands of them. I remember a little Liverpool Irishman who was a pickpocket around New York. He was known as 'Jimmy the Nibbler'. The police picked him up in Tennessee, where he lifted somebody's pocketbook, and he was sent to Nashville for seven years. In the prison they put him to work in the hospital. Then the cholera epidemic broke out. "Jim" helped the doctors and nurses, and when the doctors got sick he nursed them and the warden and his family and helped save a good many lives. After the epidemic was over the warden and the Prison Board were so grateful they got "Jim" a pardon and made up a purse of $350 for him. With the money in his pocket he came right to Chicago to see me. I began to lecture him on the futility of going back to the life he had led before.
"'I've cut that all out,' he said. 'I'm not going to be a gun any more. I've been studying medicine down there in Nashville. The doctors have been telling me things and giving me medical books to read and now I want to get into one of these colleges where I can get a diploma quick.'
"There were a number of diploma factories, as the lower class of medical colleges were called, running in Chicago then, and Jim found he had money enough to go through one of them—in the front door and out the back. But he got his diploma and license to practise and started for one of the new towns in the West. I looked him up a while ago. He comes pretty near being the most prominent citizen in the town. He is a director in a national bank and the leading physician, and has officiated at the births of half the present population. Moreover, he is an enthusiastic church member. But how long do you think it would take for the whole town to turn against him if they should ever learn out there that he is 'Jimmy the Nibbler'?
"Crooks that turn straight? Your next door neighbor, your family physician, even your clergyman, may be one of them. The world is full of them. There was one man, a professional thief, a fellow who had done time in half a dozen State prisons and penitentiaries, whom I used to labor with earnestly every time he got out, but he apparently never tried to reform. He was always doing time, it seemed.
"I lost track of him for several years. Then two years ago, when the National Association of Chiefs of Police was in session in Buffalo, I found a note in my box in my hotel signed by this man's name. He said he was going to call at seven o'clock. There was a banquet on for that evening, and hundreds of police officials from every part of the United States were there. I wondered if he knew what sort of a lion's den he was walking into. Sure enough he came into the hotel and spoke to me.
"'Don't you know that you are surrounded by policemen, some of whom are sure to spot you?' I asked him.
"'You're the only man in the world who knows me,' he said, 'My name now is So and So'—giving me another name—'and I'm a respected and prosperous man. I just wanted to let you know before you found it out for yourself, for I knew you'd be on the square with me.' And I was. So far as I knew he was not wanted for anything, and what good would have come of exposing him?